I’ve created a basic radial context menu that can be used for simple tool selection or navigation. Because of the right-click limitations in Flash/Flex I have made it accessible with Ctrl-click, but I may apply the javascript hack that makes right-click possible.

There are 2 standard modes of interaction. If you Ctrl-click without moving the mouse, the menu will stay open, allowing you to pick a tool. As users become more familiar with the navigation, they can select the tools with a single click and drag in the right direction.

This is very much an alpha level component. I may look into developing it further if anyone is interested in using it. At the moment the ’segments’ of the pie are fully skinnable, and the options in the menu are specified by a dataProvider, so it can be driven from XML, Arrays, etc.

Check it out

This is a component which has been sitting around on my hard drive for a while. I thought I may as well release it for anyone who was interested. It’s a component that turns a string of digits into a 7-segment (alarm-clock style) display. There is also a 16-segment mode for displaying characters with diagonals etc.

It’s a fairly simple bit of code, most of the work is actually figuring out the character mappings, and as such I’ve only done upper-case A-Z, 0-9 and a little bit of punctuation.

Check it out here

This little application was born out of the desire to see how long it was going to be until my big overseas trip in September. We’ve all seen countdown timers which tell us the number of minutes until the next MAX conference or the next release of flex builder, but I wanted something bigger… something better…

I know, I know, online countdown timers are a dime a dozen. So this is certainly nothing new or ground breaking. But I think it offers an improvement over most of the ones out there. For a start, there’s no server-side code, and no needing to embed a tag in your website. This isn’t for website publishers to tell you what they are holding out for, this is for you. Dates are stored as a local shared object (flash cookie) so when you go back to the site, your times are simply there.

Secondly, it goes full screen, so you feel like a badass movie villain when you break out your laptop on the plane with your full screen red letter countdown. Until you get arrested.

Even if you don’t enjoy it, maybe your kids will have fun seeing how long it is until their birthday.

Check it out here

I’ve finally got around to publishing the source for the Light Gauge, it can be found here. The zip file also includes the source for the original Gauge component.

In the process of creating the Light Gauge, I came across a bit of a hole in the Flash/Flex class libraries. There is no proper color class that handles things like RGB-HSV conversion etc. So I’ve started on the beginnings of a Color class, At the moment it just does a few simple things like RGB->HSV and some basic functions to help with creating gradients. On the to-do list are things like CYMK, complementary colors, HSL, color temperature, and more. It can be found here.

To demonstrate the HSV capabilities of the class, there is also a Color Explorer.

I was inspired by a recent slashdot post that mentioned the Quicktime ASCII Movie Player. So I hacked up a quick Flex application and in no time i had what I like to call.

To quote, it’s watching movies “the way ubergeeks were truly meant to”

Basically it just samples pixels from a video and converts them to characters with a certain brightness. There are a few videos to check out, but unfortunately, due to YouTubes’ crossdomain policy, I can’t just let you choose any Youtube video to play. Here’s a screenshot

–Update: It looks like for certain versions of Flash player, the font size is really small, this makes video playback quite slow and jerky. I’ll be fixing this soon.

–Update: This has been fixed, video may still be a little laggy though. This is more of a bandwidth issue.

Multithreading. When I’m running a CPU intensive application and It’s spluttering along on one core, I despair at all that processing power going to waste.

I think the picture sums it up.

There’s been a bit of a flex component drought on the site lately, but I finally have the next one ready. It’s another gauge, but this time with blinkenlights. I’ve created a Light Gauge Explorer, where you can customize the gauge, or you can just skip to the Demo and see whats possible.

–Update: Source is now available here

In response to Shaun’s comment on the gauge, I have added interactivity to the component so it can now be used to set the value from user interaction. If you click anywhere on the dial (and interactivity is on), the needle will move to that position.

I’m not sure the gauge is really intuitive as an input device, but it’s there anyway, just because I can.

I have been working on a number of other components and applications that I can’t wait to post here, but they need a bit of polish. Hopefully in the next few days I’ll have some brand new stuff to show.

http://www.betterthanflex.com/app/gaugeexplorer/Main.html

Betterthanflex.com is an outlet for Adobe Flex applications and components that I create in my spare time. At the moment I have been interested in creating a set of data visualization components in Flex, and to start things off, I give you my Gauge.

It is a basic needle-style gauge that can display any numeric value you want as a needle position. I have created a panel of controls so that you can interactively check out the effect of changing certain styles/properties. Gauge is still under development, and if you can think of some features you would like to see, bugs to be fixed, or indeed any other data visualization components that you think would be cool, drop me a line at alex [ at ] betterthanflex [ dot ] com.

Feel free to browse the source